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Prisoner's Story: Long Captivity Framed His War

Six months after Lieut. Curtis Jones watched a one-hour Army
training film on how to handle imprisonment by the enemy, he fell into
German hands.

That March day in 1943 was a blur. Mr. Jones is still not quite sure
what went wrong, but he is not one to second-guess the events of his
life.

"Hindsight's 20/20. Sometimes I think about how I got
captured. Other times, I wonder if I'd still be alive it I
hadn't been," says Mr. Jones, who moved to the Vineyard last
summer to be closer to his daughter.

In Tunisia, West Africa, Mr. Jones's 34th Infantry Division
pushed Germans from the west, while the British army tried to squeeze
them from the east. Somehow the Germans gained an edge, and Mr. Jones,
five fellow army officers and more than three dozen privates became
prisoners of war.

"We saw the Germans walking toward us. We had no ammunition.
There was no use fighting," says Mr. Jones, explaining he became a
"guest of the Germans" that day.

Mr. Jones was 23 years old, a college graduate and a chinaware
salesman back in the States. Like 16 million American men and women his
age, he would spend the next few years of his life on foreign soil,
fighting for a cause gripping nations an ocean away. But for Mr. Jones
and thousands of others like him, the war years would be spent behind
barbed wire fences, inside railroad cars, confined in the stalls of
abandoned horse stables dotting the countrysides of Western Africa,
Italy, Poland and Germany.

Mr. Jones, now a reedy but towering 87, talks almost casually about
his life as a prisoner of war. Captivity was his lot, he says.

"Things happened. What were you going to do?" he says.
He feels the same way about being drafted to war, about being sent to
Officer Candidates School, about being hauled to Scotland aboard the
Queen Mary with more than 15,000 fellow Americans. This was war, and
America had signed on to the cause.

He entered World War II as a private, and then signed on to an army
officer training program - the one decision he actually got to
make over the next three years of his life.

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that
being an enlisted man is not the best place to be, especially when you
enter as a private. A second lieutenant isn't much higher, but you
are extended a few privileges," he says.

Some of those same privileges were extended to him in prison camps,
a result of the Germans following the Geneva Convention - an
international understanding which governs the care and treatment of
prisoners of war. Military officers, according to the Geneva Convention,
are to be excused from manual labor. As he recalls it, the Germans
actually treated Mr. Jones and his fellow officers rather civilly.

"They respected the fact that you were an officer, but they
expected you to act like it. There was no complaining allowed,"
Mr. Jones says. "To the Germans, you were a problem, a hassle.
They'd rather not deal with you."

Life was not pleasant but bearable, Mr. Jones says. Food was scarce.
Some 53 pounds fell from his six-foot, three-inch frame in the first
month of his captivity. Although Red Cross parcels - filled with
staple rations like milk powder and canned meat - were prepared
for prisoners of war, months sometimes passed without delivery of these
packages. That's how American POWs knew, he says, that the Germans
were losing ground in the war. A contraband radio, on which they
listened to nightly British Broadcasting Corporation reports during
imprisonment in Poland, confirmed their suspicions.

After being hauled out of Tunisia that spring of 1943, Mr. Jones and
his fellow POWs joined British captives at a prison camp near Rome. The
Italians, he says, extended more kindnesses to the American soldiers
than the Germans had. But when the Italians capitulated later that year,
abandoning the prison camp where Mr. Jones was kept, he and fellow
captives were too weak to flee.

"The Germans moved in too close for us to get away. We were
just not in good enough shape to get away. We would have had to go over
the mountains to the south," Mr. Jones says. Soon thereafter, the
Germans hauled the American military officers to Offlag, a ground force
prison camp for American military officers in Szceczin, Poland.

New arrivals at Offlag were shunned until a fellow prisoner could
vouch for his authenticity. Occasionally, German officers planted a
German spy among the American prisoners to eavesdrop.

"We'd drop references like the ‘Boston
Yankees' to see if they'd react. The Germans looked just
like Americans," Mr. Jones says.

American military officers made the best of life in Offlag. A
Swedish YMCA provided sports equipment, books and instruments to the
prisoners. American POWs held weekly orchestra performances, planted a
garden and taught classes to one another.

In Offlag, intelligence from Americans made its way into the camp in
rolled-up cigarettes. Prisoners used maps to dig a 150-foot tunnel to
the exterior of the prison wall. They completed the tunnel by January
1945, but by then had received word that the Germans would soon
collapse.

The Germans held tight to these POWs until the bitter end of the
war. When the Russians drew close enough to this Polish camp for the
prisoners to hear their gunfire, the Germans retreated to their
homeland, prisoners in tow. Twelve feet of snow blanketed the ground,
and the temperature fell to 22 degrees below zero. Mr. Jones and
hundreds of other POWs marched for 48 days, traveling more than 350
miles from Poland to Germany. They ate no more than one meal a day.

The final destination was a camp near Munich. General George S.
Patton Jr. stormed the camp and freed the Americans in late April 1945.
Mr. Jones remembers "Red Cross girls coming into the camp and
throwing doughnuts to the soldiers."

The war on the European front ended June 6, 1945, and Mr. Jones flew
to Belgium to be prepared for his return home. Being a POW earned him 60
days' rest and relaxation before a return to active duty. After
several more months of service, military leaders then
"guilted" him into joining the military reserves - a
duty he fulfilled for nearly two more decades.

His prisoner of war status meant little to his fellow Americans, Mr.
Jones says.

"There were no parades, no big honors. Occasionally, a guy at
the end of the bar would buy me a drink," he recalls with a laugh.

Fewer and fewer people like Mr. Jones are still around to share
their World War II memories in first-person. Only a quarter of the 16
million men and women who served America during World War II are alive
today. Currently, these veterans, the youngest of whom are at least 75
years old, are dying at a rate of 1,000 a day.

This Memorial Day, Americans across the nation are paying special
homage to the veterans of World War II. This weekend, a memorial to the
war - 17 years in the making - will be dedicated on the Mall
in Washington, D.C.

World War II veterans on the Island will also join together for a
ceremony this Saturday at an American Legion Hall in Tisbury. The
selectmen have designated May 29 as World War II Veterans Recognition
Day. Beginning at 11 a.m., World War II veterans will be presented
certificates by the Dukes County Veterans Services. Jo Ann Murphy,
county veterans' agent, said she expects at least 60 veterans to
attend, including several women who served in the Women's Army
Corps. A special ceremony for veterans living in Windemere Nursing and
Rehabilitation Home will be held June 3.

Other Memorial Day festivities will be held as usual this year. At
7:30 a.m. Monday, volunteers will begin staking 400 flags along the
Avenue of Flags at Oak Grove Cemetery in Vineyard Haven in memory or in
honor of military veterans. At 10 o'clock, veterans, firefighters,
the sheriff's department honor guard, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts
will march from the American Legion Hall to the Avenue of Flags. Wreaths
will be placed on war memorial boulders within the cemetery. A Blackhawk
helicopter from Otis Air Force Base in Bourne will fly over the cemetery
in tribute.